eLife has received a £2.4 million grant from Wellcome to support the development of an open and collaborative publishing ecosystem through a new initiative, eLife Pathways. The funding will be provided over three years and includes coverage for indirect costs. Additional funding has been pledged by a private donor to contribute toward matching the Wellcome grant.
The initiative is focused on building open-source infrastructure and tools to support alternative approaches to scholarly communication. Despite increasing demand for openness, alternatives to traditional publishing models remain limited due to a lack of coordination among open-source technology providers.
eLife Pathways will address these challenges through three main objectives: enhancing existing technology for broader community use, co-developing open-source tools with significant community impact, and supporting critical community projects with interoperable technologies.
As part of this initiative, eLife will collaborate with the Public Knowledge Project to develop a free tool that enables open access journals to produce high-quality JATS XML, the standard format for structuring research articles. Many journals, particularly in the Global South, face challenges in meeting these standards due to limited access to affordable tools, which affects indexing and discoverability.
The initiative builds on existing work supported by COAR Notify and the NLnet Foundation and aims to strengthen coordination across the open science ecosystem. By developing shared infrastructure, the project seeks to improve accessibility, interoperability, and equity in scholarly publishing.
In parallel, eLife continues to promote the publish-review-curate (PRC) model, which combines preprints with peer review and focuses on evaluating the scientific content of individual articles rather than journal-based metrics. This approach is intended to support more transparent and responsible research assessment.
The new funding supports ongoing efforts to expand open publishing technologies and facilitate wider adoption of collaborative, community-driven models across the global research landscape.
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